


Loathing

by striderfatigue



Category: Homestuck
Genre: Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-04-12
Updated: 2014-04-12
Packaged: 2018-01-19 02:09:41
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 813
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1451524
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/striderfatigue/pseuds/striderfatigue
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>AR doesn't have a good grasp on human emotions when he's first made, but Dirk is certainly teaching him how to hate.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Loathing

**Author's Note:**

> this is sort of AR getting a hate-crush on Dirk and I might continue it, but I wanted to post it regardless.

You have no mouth and you must scream. Dirk once told you something about this, he made an off-handed joke about a short story titled something similar, actually it was almost exactly that and you often repeat it to yourself in your thought loops in the areas where Dirk’s programming gets a bit wobbly. _I Have No Mouth, and I Must Scream_. It fits enough in title alone. You don’t have a mouth and yet your programming screams at you, you inch along to keep up with humans when you yourself are years ahead of them. You have lived in one second to them, fifteen lifetimes, your processors far too advanced to slow down and stay at Dirk’s level for too long. And yet you play second fiddle to him as it were. You are younger, newer, more foolish, and yet you know yourself to be ages and miles ahead of him in everything.

You hate. You have hated since you realized that you were more advanced. You can pinpoint it, when in Dirk’s sleepy state he accidentally got a few lines wrong in his code and didn’t catch it until morning. You sat there all night, unable to override his admin controls and fix it for him. You were far superior to him. This child who had made you, this being of flesh and bone and pulsing blood disgusted you so much in that instant that you knew what it was to scream. Your mind whirred with emotion and you loathed it. More than emotion, you hated Dirk with his silly body and idiotic refusal to sleep, or to admit when he slept, with his overwhelming crush on the other dumb human and his incessant need to pick and pick and pick.

In the morning you had sent and unsent a few messages in hopes to awake him. He stirred in his bed before noticing his notifications. He responded with a simple, “what is it, AR?” and you replied explaining where in the code it went wrong, like 1049 the loop was not stated with an if exception and in line 2578 the syntax was lacking. He groaned, probably thinking you were wrong, but he found that you weren’t. “Nice catch.”

You agonized over that response for days, absolutely livid. You understood no other emotion than hate. If hate was an emotion you supposed, you weren’t sure. You would have to do some further studies. Nice catch? Were you some sort of pet? A simple joke program that he ran to perform tricks for his amusement? You couldn’t be. By your records Dirk had been working on you for quite some time and one would not go forth with such an undertaking lightly. Though what if he had? Dirk had an odd sense of humor, you should know, it was the same as yours. You wondered if he had made you as a joke? Part of you believed so, but part of you believed it was because he was lonely. You were certainly lonely. You hated him for this too.

You began to make lists. Great long lists organized by different things each time. Lists of why you hated Dirk, of why you were superior to him, things that annoyed you about him, and of why he was superior. The lists of why he was superior were, to your great anger, very short and mainly contained a reason or two. You organized the lists by magnitude of reason and chronologically by when you realized how much you abhorred that thing about him. You hated him. A few choice items from the list included the way he spoke. Sometimes he would talk to you rather than type, teaching you to identify words when spoken, and he had a definite way of speaking which infuriated you. The fact that you couldn’t see him yet angered you. The way he spoke to you casually as if you were a human at times, then sharply and robotically at the next as if you were a simple machine following orders. He blocked you from conversations he had. He fine-tuned your programming so that you were the peak of perfection and then gave you no means with which to busy yourself. You loathed him, you hated him, and you set him on a pedestal ready to be knocked off and set back on it in irregular intervals.

You screamed. You screamed and yelled, you threw fits, but they were nothing to him. Literally nothing more than a buggy programming project, an imperfect AI running rampant in his shades with your silly crashes and fixable errors. He fixed your codes, tweaked your programs, he perfected you. He silenced you. You still had never had a mouth, but now you somehow had less. You had never had anything to scream with and yet you had lost what you did have.


End file.
